Ernst von Dohnányi: A Song of Life

Five: 1937-1944

In 1937 Hubay died, and Dohnányi succeeded him in the Upper House of the Hungarian Senate. From 2 to 10 April 1937 Dohnányi undertook an exhausting but successful concert tour with his Budapest Philharmonic. He conducted the music of German and Hungarian composers over a period of nine days in as many cities: Breslau, Berlin, Hamburg, Mülheim, Cologne, Frankfurt, Mannheim, Baden-Baden, and Munich. Everywhere they went, the Orchestra and its Conductor were guests of the city, and they were granted every luxury and hospitality imaginable. Dohnányi, however, became fatigued . He conducted most of the concert in Munich with a fever, and then practically collapsed. The final piece on the program was conducted by his concertmaster Carl Melles. Dohnányi subsequently committed himself for two weeks to a hospital in Garmisch-Partenkirchen. In July 1937 festivals celebrating Dohnányi’s sixtieth birthday were arranged all over the world, especially in Budapest.1 The main celebration, a huge banquet of a thousand people, had been held in the winter with Dohnányi present. In July, when it actually was his birthday, Dohnányi fled into the Austrian Mountains. He spent two weeks in Styria and two weeks in the Tyrol on the high peak called the “Ehrenbach-höhe” to escape the celebrations and be alone to relax. To his surprise, when he turned on the radio, he heard his own music. Radio Vienna was celebrating the birthday of the Hungarian Maestro by playing his Variationen über ein Kinderlied. That winter my parents gave a dinner party to which they invited Dohnányi and his wife.2 I happened to be in Budapest and was present on FIVE 1937–1944  1. Hungary’s feelings were best expressed in an article of the Pesti Napló written on 28 July 1937; see Appendix C. 2. My father, Julius Zachár, was Dohnányi’s friend from Breznóbánya and Budapest. Dohnányi’s grandmother and my father’s grandmother were cousins. 112 | Ernst von Dohnányi this occasion. I was very excited about this evening because I had never met Dohnányi before. Nevertheless, I could not get close to him in the crowd of guests who were swarming in the room. After supper, I felt two palms being gently pressed against my eyes from behind me. A man’s voice I had never heard before asked mockingly, “Guess who I am?” Puzzled, I wheeled around to find myself face to face with Ernst von Dohnányi. There was a smile on his lips and in his bright blue eyes as he looked at me. He gently took both of my hands and, patting my flushed cheek, murmured, “You resemble your father, my dear . . . I recognized you immediately.” I congratulated him on having been so widely celebrated on his sixtieth birthday, but he waved away my compliments with a shrug of his shoulders . “I would be happy to have such a birthday,” I remarked awkwardly. “Not if it were your sixtieth,” he said smiling. He asked how old I was. “Twenty-seven,” I said, almost ashamed. In spite of my few years, I realized that I felt older than him. In appearance, as well as in spirit, he was full of vitality. “That reminds me,” he said, “how a friend of mine felt when he was over eighty. ‘If I only could be seventy again!’ he would say longingly.” A few minutes later Mrs. Dohnányi came to tell him that they had to leave. She reminded him that he was recovering from his thrombosis as well as a pleural inflammation and that he should not wear himself out. By the way she commandingly spoke and the look of reproach and annoyance he secretly threw her, I realized that there was little understanding between them and that he was probably just as unhappy and lonesome as I was in my marriage.3 He awoke in me such a deep sympathy and an infinite admiration that I would have given anything to make him as happy as he deserved to be. The Dohnányis left abruptly; Dohnányi was not the type of man to protest or say even one offensive word to a woman, especially his wife. When they were gone, people began to whisper about the way Mrs. Dohnányi was keeping her husband perfectly under her thumb. In her jealousy she would energetically interfere whenever he tried to speak to another woman, even in company. A...